travel innovation

Future of Digital Marketing from @lakey via twitpic

Yesterday I was at the Future of Digital Marketing event organised by the ever-cheerful Ashley Friedlein, where there were some great talks.  Eric Frenchman had flown over from the US and gave a terrifying glimpse into how the US electoral system really works, in terms of search marketing (he worked on the John McCain campaign), with campaigns created in real time in response to new events and press coverage.  It all seems a far cry from Gordon Brown on youtube.  Speaking of which, one of the interesting things about working in the same building as the Labour Party is that we occasionally get some interesting protests going on – see today’s blood-spattered corpse of the prime minister outside our front door!  (I wonder if MI5 will pick up those keywords and get suspicious?)

The Paradox of Choice

In my talk I introduced a theme that is one of the influences on our work this year, especially the apps we’re working on at the moment that you’ll see in a few months.  In 2004 Barry Schwartz published a book called The Paradox of Choice, looking at whether the ever-increasing amount of choice in our lives is actually making us happier.  It’s a thought-provoking book and I recommend you read it as I can’t summarise it here, but one aspect I did highlight in my talk was the difference between satisficers and maximisers.

Let’s say you’re after a hotel in Pisa for a night (as I was last weekend).  Imagine you’ve done a search and seen a big list of results.  The satisficer will have an idea of what she’s looking for – a central place, under 100 euros, with a nice-looking photo for instance.  If the second hotel on the list fits the bill, she’ll book it.  Job done.  No need to even look at the rest of the list.  The maximiser, on the other hand, will wonder… perhaps there’s a better one.  And of course there will be.  Further down the list there will be a cheaper one, but with a worse location.  A more expensive one with a nicer breakfast.  One with a pool.  He didn’t even know he wanted a pool, but now it’s a must!  Before long he’s spent the whole evening searching for the perfect small boutique hotel near the centre of town, outstandingly cheap, yet with an olympic sized pool and award-winning chef.  Of course there is no such place.  So when he ends up booking the same hotel the satisficer booked, he’ll end up with the exact same experience.  But he’ll be much less happy.  He’ll be full of regrets for all the things he could have had.  And in the long run, he’ll be much less healthy, more likely to get depressed, drink more, catch swine flu, and have a heart attack.  I made the last bit up but you get the idea.  Of course the strange thing is that the hotel, and the company doing the booking, has made the exact same profit selling the exact same thing to these customers.  But one’s happy and one isn’t.  And many of us have sites pandering to the maximisers out there, ruining their health, giving them pages and pages of options and choices.

This is one of a few themes we’ll touch on in this blog from time to time, so that by the time we do launch our new apps you’ll have some of the background thinking too.  It’s worth mentioning, by the way, that when you search for a hotel in Pisa on lastminute.com you’ll often see one of our “top-secret hotels.” This is a good way to help people short-cut their decision making process, and therefore make them happier.  You know it’s a central hotel, and how many stars it has, and that it has a nice fat discount.  You just don’t know which exact hotel it is, until you book it.  If you end up enjoying it, what a great deal!  And a story to tell.  If you don’t, you can blame us, not your own obsessive searching habits, and be the happier for it.